


Rien de Rien

by cassandramortmain



Category: The Rook (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/F, F/M, Internal Monologue, Self-Indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-11-24 20:04:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 14,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20913344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassandramortmain/pseuds/cassandramortmain
Summary: Gestalt, Myfanwy, and the nature of regret. Covers all of season one.





	1. Prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the verge of regrettable behavior.

It took a while, afterwards, for them to come back to themselves. To remember which body was which.

They hadn’t known it would take them like that, when she had her hands on them.

They had touched her before that night, touched her with most of their hands before. She’d let their hands brush when she passed them a carton of Chinese takeout; she’d bumped her shoulders against theirs walking down the hall. She’d hit them (mostly playing). She had hugged them. 

And they had done the same to her. They had touched her plenty. 

But they had never touched her like that before. Had never touched the scars inside her thighs before, never pulled down the straps of her dress, never had her lips pressing against theirs, hard and urgent, like she needed to touch them like they needed to touch her, like she was running out of time. 

Maybe that was why they hadn’t known it would be like that. Like all the walls in their mind were coming down at once. Like her hands were in all of them, loving all of them. Like she was a bolt of lightning, striking their four bodies in a single instant.

They were holding her to them on the chaise in the coat room. Heads pressed together. Laughing into each others’ mouths. Hands on her back, rubbing the skin there. They could just barely feel the beginnings of the scar on her ribs from the fire at Glengrove; her dress was bunched up around her waist and covering most of it but the edge was exposed and they were brushing it with their smallest finger. 

“People will be wanting their coats,” she breathed.

“Well, they can just fuck off, then, can’t they?”

There, that was went they meant, about not being able to tell the bodies apart. That was a Teddy sentence, obviously, or maybe Alex could get away with it if they’d said it with less of a growl. Sounded all wrong in Robert’s accent.

(The teachers used to make them practice that, at Glengrove, would reprimand them when they got it wrong. “Now, Gestalt, is that an Eliza sentence or is it an Alex sentence?” Would make them say it over again in the proper voice until it sounded right. Humiliating. But it had to be done, for the compartmentalization to work.)

Myfanwy didn’t seem to notice, just laughed more. Pressed kisses to their cheek, their jaw, under their ear. “We should really—” she said, “we should—”

“Okay,” they said, and kissed her again. 

It wasn’t as though they weren’t aware of what the rest of them was doing. Teddy was leaning on the other side of the coat room door and glaring at anyone who looked at all as though they planned to pick up their coat and leave the party, and Eliza was sitting on the stairs with their ankles crossed primly, doing their apologetic smile as Teddy redirected traffic. People were grumbling but they weren’t that pissed; they all thought it must be an agency emergency if Gestalt was involved. 

And anyway, people liked it when women were apologetic and Eliza was good at it. They just had to keep that body sitting down, because Gestalt was not entirely certain Eliza’s legs would hold them up if they needed to move. 

Alex’s wouldn’t, they’d figured that one out pretty much as soon as they got Robert’s hand up Myfanwy’s dress. That’s why they’d had Alex sit down at a table with their phone in front of them and pretend to be reading something important.

Anyway. The point was that they were fully aware of all of that. So it wasn’t as though they had forgotten how to function. 

It was just that the boundaries were blurrier than they were used to.

Myfanwy was ending the kiss now, pulling away from their hands, pulling her own hands out of their hair, working the straps of her dress back up her shoulders. They let their hands fall to their sides, obedient. 

“Okay,” she breathed, and stood up. 

They felt it at once. The doubt creeping in, cold and damp, now that Myfanwy wasn’t blazing hot in their arms and burning everything else away. 

She went to the mirror, straightened her dress, fiddled with her hair. Her legs didn’t seem to be that stable either. That was something.

She hadn’t really said what it meant, why she was doing it. She’d said, “It’s always been you, Gestalt,” but that didn’t necessarily mean — what they wanted it to mean. 

Maybe it just meant that she was drunk. Maybe it meant she’d gotten carried away in the moment and hadn’t meant to say or do anything and just wanted to stay friends, only things would be unbearably awkward now, and they’d just spoiled the most important relationship in their life for a quick shag in a coat cupboard. Maybe it meant she’d been secretly pining away for them for years and now she was going to let them bring her to their flat and keep her in their bed where they could keep touching her and watching her and always know that she’d be safe. 

“I’ll go out now,” Myfanwy said. “Why don’t you wait five minutes before you go out too?”

That ruled out option three, anyway.

“Sure,” they said. “Need a mo to recover anyway.” 

She blushed prettily at that. Averted her eyes and ended up looking at the lights instead. “Shit,” she said, “we’re lucky I didn’t break these.”

The lights had only stopped flashing … two minutes ago? Time was fuzzy too. It had been after she’d come down a bit, after they’d pulled out, after they’d cradled her against them and petted her hair for awhile. 

They liked it, the idea that they affected her that way. Like they broke down the walls in her mind the way she broke down the walls in theirs. 

Anyway the lights had probably helped sell the emergency idea.

“Is that a challenge?” they said, because they couldn’t help it, and she laughed and rolled her eyes at them and opened the door.

On the other side of the door they took her hand in Teddy’s, barely touching her and only long enough to help her over the threshold. It still went right through all of them again. The lightning bolt of her.

Myfanwy scoffed as though they were being ridiculous, but from where Eliza was sitting on the stairs they had a clear view of her face and it had gone soft. She let her fingers linger against their hand. 

“Whatever happens next,” she said, “I want you to know that I don’t regret this.” She put her hand on Teddy’s cheek. They felt all four of their mouths open as they breathed in sharp. “I don’t regret _you_, Gestalt,” she said, looking them right in the eye. 

They wanted to say they didn’t regret it either. They wanted to tell her they would never regret anything they did with her. They wanted to kiss her again. They put their hand over hers on their face. 

And then Myfanwy pulled her hand away. She turned and faced Eliza on the stairs and smiled slow and sweet. Like she could see all of them. Even without touching them. Like they mattered to her.

Then she was out of the door of the hallway, into the party. Leaving them to work out how to move their limbs and build their walls back up again. On their own.


	2. A One-Time Thing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy isn't answering her phone, and Gestalt is absolutely fine.

“I want you to know that I don’t regret this. I don’t regret _you_, Gestalt.”

They floated on the memory of her face when she said that all the way back home, all through the night and into the next morning. They floated on it right up until the moment that they came up with the brilliant idea of calling her.

It was too soon. They knew that. When they were working on a mark, they never called them the morning after. The point was to let the mark have time to miss you, to let them realize how important you were to them. Ideally Gestalt would wait until the mark called _them_, but even if timelines got tight and they needed to move before the mark had made contact, they wouldn’t call before at least twenty-four hours had passed. Otherwise they would come off desperate. Unattractive. The mark would become useless.

But Myfanwy wasn’t a mark. She was their best friend. Probably their only friend. (Did Ingrid count as a friend? No, absolutely not.) And when you get drunk and fuck your best/only friend of fifteen years at a party — they decided, standing all in a row and brushing their teeth — surely it’s acceptable to call them the next morning to debrief. 

Especially after she explicitly tells you that she doesn’t regret it. Surely?

(They didn’t have that much experience calling people after sex in other circumstances. Non-work circumstances. Dating was a confusing experience with four bodies. Simpler just to leave it lie. Let each body go home with someone now and then, to keep the appetite from getting distracting, but not try for anything more complicated than that. Neater that way.)

Strategically it maybe wasn’t the best move. But it was Sunday, which meant it was their only day off all week as long as nothing in the city went wrong, so they had nothing to do to distract them. And once the idea of calling her had occurred to them they couldn’t leave it alone. The idea of talking to her, hearing her voice, hearing her tell them again that she didn’t regret it. Maybe hearing her asking them to come to her flat, or inviting herself over to theirs. 

They kept fiddling with their phones and then putting them down again, but every time they got one body to put down the phone they just ended up walking over to Robert’s coat so they could smell the rose oil from where it had rubbed onto the fabric off her skin, and honestly, that made them feel more pathetic than staring at their phones did. So they called her.

Myfanwy’s phone went straight to voicemail.

They checked the time on Alex’s phone. 10 AM. 

Myfanwy never slept late, not since the Glengrove fire. She said she was a morning person, which she wasn’t. They thought most likely she just didn’t sleep very much at all.

Well. Probably she was hungover. She was sleeping off a hangover and she had her phone switched off. She would wake up later, dehydrated and cranky, and she would turn on her phone and see that they had called her and then she would call them back and she would ask them to come over. 

And then they would come over and make bacon sandwiches and tease her until she laughed, and they would make her drink water and take an aspirin because she never took care of herself enough, and then they would climb back into bed with her and soothe her and touch her and hold onto the warmth of her until she made the lights flash on and off again. 

Maybe they could bring more than one body to hers, so they could touch her with more than one pair of hands this time. Not four bodies, not right away, they didn’t want to overwhelm her. But maybe two. 

(They’d only done that a few times, sex with more than one body there. It felt better, to have another self there when they were so vulnerable, the same way it felt better to sleep all in the same place, without their mind scattered about. But it was tricky with the other person involved. So often like playing into someone else’s fetish. Clinical. It wouldn’t be like that with Myfanwy. She understood how they worked. When she looked at them she saw all of them.)

(If they had four bodies there with Myfwany, maybe they were the ones who would be overwhelmed.)

They called again at noon and she didn’t pick up. She didn’t pick up at one, either, or at two. 

Which — they decided, loading their two dishwashers with all four bodies — was fine. It was fine. So she was avoiding their calls. That was absolutely fine.

She shouldn’t have told them that she didn’t regret it, that was all. Maybe she’d meant it last night, when she was still giddy on sex hormones and champagne, but she still shouldn’t have said it if she wasn’t certain it would last to the next morning, because that would be cruel of her, and obviously it hadn’t lasted. Obviously she did regret it. She regretted it enough to be cruel. 

But it was fine.

Anyway, they knew her. If she hadn’t picked up the phone by now she wasn’t going to. She was in her head about something, anxious and paranoid. 

Paranoid about what? Them? Or someone else finding out that she had been with them?

Probably the second one. She had been so careful, leaving the coat room last night, so worried about someone else seeing her with them. They hadn’t thought much about it at the time, because they hadn’t been capable of thinking about much at the time, but obviously she had been worried. 

Now she’d be fixating on it. She had probably decided that someone had seen them now, was probably pacing across her flat and debating whether or not to call her vetting officer.

It would be disastrous if she did, they thought, pacing with one body and putting away dishes with two more and letting a fourth chew their thumbnail. They had worked so hard to be where they were, to be the best. They didn’t need a vetting officer going through their life with a fine tooth comb. 

Not that the vetting department would find anything. There was nothing to find. But the extra scrutiny would throw them off their game. They would make stupid mistakes. Lose progress at work. 

And anyway Myfanwy didn’t need that kind of scrutiny either. She never reacted well to that sort of thing, she just got all squirrely and even more anxious than ever. They’d seen it happen every time Farrier decided to tighten up internal security and they all went through another round of heightened surveillance at work, and Myfanwy would burrow into her office with her shoulders up around her ears and her jaw tense and refuse to leave and instead just send Ingrid wheeling out for anything she needed. 

(They weren’t sure but they suspected she was more likely to cut on those days too. Which they weren’t supposed to know about, but. They had been in the same dorm. Even after Glengrove had burnt down, in the temporary holding facilities afterward, it had been the same dorm. Hard to hide things.)

(She had sighed, last night, when they kissed the scars on her thighs. They’d felt her go loose and melting in their arms. Like they had given her absolution.)

She probably hadn’t called her vetting officer yet. It would be too drastic even for Myfanwy on a panic spiral. Probably she was waiting until she saw them. Until she’d had a chance to see if they were planning to cause any problems for her over what had happened.

Well. They weren’t. They could tell her that. They had been a little confused at first — because she’d confused them, with the way she was talking, the way she had touched them — but they were clear now. 

It was a one-time thing. They would tell her that, when they saw her.


	3. Rose Oil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy visits the bridge, and Alex's face is a traitor.

“I got stung by a bee!”

Honestly. Did she think they were stupid? Did she think they were a fucking idiot?

Like they hadn’t gone to school with Myfanwy Thomas. Like they didn’t know exactly what she looked like when she lied. 

Well, anyway. That only made it clearer, how much she regretted what they’d done together. How much they needed to reset this situation to status quo.

They had planned a speech. Planned out how they would explain to her that they thought it had been a mistake, the same way she so clearly thought it was a mistake, and so there was absolutely no reason for her to call her vetting officer. Picked Robert to deliver it, because Robert was the best at sounding calm and reasonable. (Also Robert was the one she’d actually had sex with, and objectively the handsomest, and also the one Myfanwy had told Eliza she had a crush on when she was sixteen, so. If she were going to change her mind again, it would be more likely to happen with that body, probably.) 

They had planned out how composed they would be, how cool and remote, while she would fret and wring her hands the way she did when she was nervous.

But when they finally got her alone — and what was she thinking, coming in so late, with ten dead bodies on the slabs downstairs — it wasn’t the way they’d planned it. 

To begin with, she wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t calm, exactly; she was a little shaky, a little stiff around them in a way she usually wasn’t; but she wasn’t in fight or flight mode like they expected. Just looked up at them and her eyes were as cool and wary as they had planned for theirs to be. 

Disorienting. It made them trip over their words, forget their speech, lean in closer than they meant to and start whispering to her about that fucking rose oil. Like they thought they could change her mind. Like they wanted her to change her mind. Like they wanted to touch her again.

But when they did touch her — just a brush of a finger against hers, barely making contact, not anywhere near enough for her to break down their walls like she had before — she flinched away. Minutely, but they saw it.

She knew what happened when she touched them. And she didn’t want any part in it. Didn’t want to touch them at all. 

To be expected, really. They didn’t know what they had been thinking before.

\--

Working was a relief. Ten dead bodies and a missing EVA target, plus a loud American who kept trying to steal their case: that was a concrete problem, something real for them to attack. A genuine test of their formidable skill set. 

Also it gave them something to think about that wasn’t her.

(She’d been having a panic attack at the end of that meeting with the home secretary. Probably not about them. Probably she wasn’t thinking about them at all. Anyway it wasn’t their concern.)

But then she showed up at the bridge and what were they supposed to do with that? Pretend that Myfanwy Thomas showing up anywhere where there could be blood and bits of dead bodies and carnage was a normal thing that just happened every day? Pretend that Myfanwy Thomas would ever willingly seek out gore? Pretend that Myfanwy ever went on site visits anywhere when she’d arranged her entire adult life so she never had to go to any place that wasn’t her flat or her office? 

Myfanwy didn’t even go out to go _grocery shopping_. She got it delivered. (They’d told her it was a mistake, that it meant she wouldn’t be able to control the quality of what she was buying, and she’d raised an eyebrow and said, “All right then, control freak.” Which, coming from her. Ludicrous.)

There just wasn’t any reason Myfanwy would ever go to the bridge. Any reason except for, well. Them. 

They couldn’t stop their hearts from beating faster at that idea. Couldn’t stop the part of their mind that had felt sulky and panicked ever since the first time she didn’t answer the phone yesterday morning from scrambling to its feet, from pricking its ears up hopefully, like a puppy. 

What they could do was stop all that from showing on three of their four bodies, but Alex’s face was a traitor. Could never hide anything. It was for that very reason that they’d wisely kept Alex away from their sensitive meeting with a source who required a delicate hand and stationed that body at the bridge instead. 

At the bridge where Myfanwy could find them.

Fuck. Why hadn’t they seen this coming? Why hadn’t they planned for it? They weren’t supposed to make mistakes.

But it didn’t matter anyway in the end, because whatever Myfanwy was doing at the bridge, she was emphatically not looking for them. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at them. Would only train her eyes at a point in the air over their shoulder and stammer apologies about being drunk, about not remembering. 

Which was so clearly a lie, because if she didn’t remember it then why couldn’t she look them in the face like she always had before? 

She remembered it. She just didn’t want to remember it. 

Which was fine. Absolutely fine. They didn’t want to remember it either, come to that. 

And then Farrier had them chauffeuring her around town, as though they didn’t have better things to do. As though they weren’t actively in the process of finding someone who could kill eight people in one blast, as though saving Myfanwy Thomas from the great inconvenience of having to drunkenly order an Uber should be their first priority. 

It was infuriating, honestly. They’d spent the whole day running around the city after this atomic bomb of a missing EVA, and Myfanwy had what? Swanned into the office late, spent the afternoon god knew where, spent the evening at a bar drinking every cocktail on the menu. As though doing her job were optional. As though they had resources to spare right now. 

And Farrier was coddling her the way she always did, sending them out to clean up Myfanwy’s mess. Farrier had never gone that easy on them. Not even at the very beginning at Glengrove, when they’d been a feral-eyed child with no English. She’d always liked Myfanwy better.

They cold shouldered Myfanwy in the car, even though they knew she hated that, knew she could never withstand the silent treatment. Felt a mean flush of satisfaction when she broke the silence first and started needling them: “So we’re not talking?” 

It felt good, arguing with her. It felt familiar in a way that nothing else with her had felt familiar since she’d first let them kiss her at the Founder’s Feast two nights ago. This at least they knew how to do, knew it from teenage squabbles at Glengrove and from all the rest of it, from being two people who worked very high pressure jobs in close quarters and who maybe sometimes had conflicting ideas about the most efficient and effective way to handle a given situation. From being two people who had lived through the things they had both lived through and were maybe, okay, just a little fucked up because of it.

It felt so good that they let themselves get meaner, let themselves throw Bristol in her face. They were going to feel like shit about that one later but in the moment it was worth it, the shock in her eyes. The way she looked right at them for the first time all day. 

She didn’t look hurt at all, was the funny thing. They had expected to hurt her with that one. Had sort of meant to. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said. Like she really wanted to know. Like she wanted to make them say exactly what they were implying, like she wanted to make them face it.

“You know what it means,” they said instead. 

A weak response. Not satisfying at all. She had the last word on them.

She still smelled of that fucking rose oil.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just did the math and realized that if I kept to the one-a-day schedule I'd need to post the final chapter next Sunday, when I will be away from a computer for 10 days. (Math: so much harder than words.) So we're doing two chapters today, and then we'll return to our regular posting schedule tomorrow. Carry on!


	4. Slow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy takes the train, and Gestalt comes to a realization.

Farrier called them early in the morning, when they were eating breakfast, still only half-compartmentalized. 

“There’s something going on with Myfanwy,” she said by way of greeting. “You’ve noticed, haven’t you?”

They hummed noncommittally, holding the phone up to Eliza’s ear. Farrier was given to this sort of thing, to cozy gossiping and alliance-building behind everyone else’s back, and it was best, they thought, not to let her rope them into it too easily. Make her work if she wanted them as an ally. And if she was trying to trick them, to get them to say something about Myfanwy without thinking so that she could trap them into a meeting with the vetting department, it was better to make her work for that too.

“Well, I’ve noticed,” she said. “I thought you might have too, since you’re so close. Or used to be, I suppose.” 

Punishing them for not agreeing with her immediately. It landed, but they didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing it. They hummed again.

“I’m worried about her,” she went on. “I’d like you to keep an eye on her this morning.”

That was an order, however politely phrased, and it required a response with words. “Easy enough,” they said. “Her office has glass walls.” 

“No,” Farrier said, “you misunderstand me. I’d like you to keep an eye on her now. Before she makes it to the office.”

Teddy put down their spoon, Alex froze with their mug of tea at their lips, and Robert’s eyebrows crept up to their hairline, but they kept Eliza steady and still. Farrier could smell weakness over the phone. “You want me to tail her,” they said. 

“Just to make sure nothing happens,” Farrier said, “while she still seems so off balance. No need for her to know, I don’t want to worry her any more than she already is.” 

“I see,” they said.

“Oh, and Gestalt?” Farrier added. “I’d like your full attention on this matter, please.” 

She wanted all four of them tailing Myfanwy — Myfanwy who never went anywhere except her flat and the office and wherever she had fucked off to all day yesterday — and she didn’t want Myfanwy to know about it. 

“Understood,” they said.

It was interesting about Farrier, they thought twenty minutes later, in their car a discreet half-block from the exit to the car park at Myfanwy’s flat. Myfanwy had run up to Farrier’s office yesterday after that meeting, now that they thought of it; had probably spent most of what little time she’d been in Apex House with Farrier, before she disappeared to the bridge and the bar and wherever else she had been. And Farrier had called them last night to have them pick her up, had known exactly where Myfanwy was.

Could it be that it was something besides them that was making Myfanwy act so off these past few days? She’d been scattered for weeks now, ever since that mess with the psychic, but the disappearing act she’d pulled after the Founder’s Feast was new. And the possessive way Farrier was wrapping her up, as though she were making sure Myfanwy didn’t wriggle away from the Chequy, that was new too.

And then there was that other matter, the problem they’d been taking care not to look at too closely. What had happened at the bridge, at the bank. It looked like Myfanwy. Or not like Myfanwy, but. Like Glengrove. It looked a lot like the Glengrove fire.

Not that Myfanwy would ever have anything to do with it, of course. She would have told them, for one thing. And for another, she had made sure that she couldn’t do something like that again. Had built her whole life around not feeling the kinds of things that had made her start that fire. 

Nothing to make her too excited, like caffeine or field work or even clothes she actually liked. Plenty to bring her down. The pills. Lots of wine. Those razors. 

But if they had seen the connection between the bridge and Glengrove then she could have too. It might have brought up bad memories. 

That would be dreadful for her. Make her even more anxious than usual. Make her act not like herself. 

Maybe make her skive off work and drink every cocktail on the menu at a bar and not want to talk to anyone, not even them?

That must have been it. And she would have been at the bridge not to talk to them, of course not, but to see for herself how close the resemblance was. To punish herself with bad memories. 

They should have seen it before. They had been so wrapped up in themselves. They should ask her about it later, after they’d seen her safely off to work. Meet her in the office as though they hadn’t tailed her all morning, ask her to lunch, mention their new leads. They’d have new leads by then, probably. Make her see that whoever had done that blast on the bridge was nothing at all like her. Make her see that Glengrove was all in the past now. They’d do it as soon as they were finished with this bullshit job.

It was after they had chosen a lunch spot and while they were still debating whether they needed reservations or if that would make things feel weird and formal that Myfanwy came rocketing out of her car park. On foot, not in a car. Quite clearly fleeing something. 

Suddenly the job felt a lot less like bullshit. 

She wasn’t running, but she was moving fast. Had a hood up, but it was only making her more conspicuous, it was such a bright day, and they felt a stab of panicked annoyance at her: didn’t she know by now how to lose herself in a crowd? 

Two men behind her. Big and bulky, trying to hide themselves but being clumsy about it. Vultures. Not very good ones but they could do some damage if they didn’t bother too much about being discreet. And vultures often didn’t.

Fuck.

Their phones all chimed at once. Farrier: _I’m on the line with her, I’ll send her to the Tube._

_Victoria northernbound_, they texted back from Teddy’s phone. Alex was already moving, jogging ahead to the station so they could get her onto the train. Robert started up the car to drive Teddy and Eliza one station back so they could pick up the train and then meet her in the compartment. Tricky timing but it would keep the vultures guessing. 

And what the fuck were vultures doing going after Myfanwy anyway? She hadn’t really used her EVA in years.

She was so small. They forgot that sometimes, she was so bright and lightning sharp in their mind, but they remembered when they saw her hurtle down the moving staircase into the Underground station with the vulture pelting afterwards, right before they rammed themselves into him. And then again, once she’d made it onto the train and the vulture was coming after her like an arrow: she was so small she was getting swallowed up by that hood she still had flipped up over her hair, like a girl in a fairy story. 

They pushed her out of the way as gently as they could, using Eliza’s hands because they were softer than Teddy’s, and led her to the next car while they pummeled the vulture, and the way she looked at them — 

Well. It was the way they had always wanted her to look at them. The way they might have occasionally imagined her looking at them, in the privacy of their own mind, during certain scenarios in which they heroically saved her from grave danger and in response she was overcome with both gratitude and a deep and profound attraction. To all four of them. 

They filed that look away to consider later, when she was out of danger, and made her switch jackets with them. Carefully did not think about how she looked wearing their favorite coat, and instead let the vulture take the bait. 

It wasn’t ideal, having one of their bodies be unconscious, but it was bearable. It made everything muffled, though, as though they were wearing cheap earplugs, or had one eye covered, or had oven mitts over their hands. Less sensory input coming in than they were used to. But they couldn’t think about that, because they still had to see to bringing in the vultures who thought they could hurt Myfanwy. Still had to bring Myfanwy safely into the office.

She didn’t look at them like that again in the car. Didn’t look at them at all, really. Kept her shoulders hunched up like the vultures were still after her and she wanted to make herself as small as she could. Wouldn’t answer any of their questions. 

But when they told her Eliza was in the infirmary, she went pale and flew up the stairs to them. Sat on the edge of their bed and told them they were incredible. And then she kissed them until all the walls in their mind broke down again.

(They crashed a car. Fuck, that was embarassing.) 

The nurse came in and interrupted them before they could get too caught up in the kiss, forget where they were and do something extremely unprofessional, and Myfanwy ran away almost immediately again, but that was all right. They watched her go and felt the part of them that had been knotted up with fear for the past two days relax. 

It was so clear to them now, what had happened. It wasn’t that she regretted having sex at the Founder’s Feast. It was that she’d been afraid. 

They could understand that. It was enormous, the thing between the two of them. Every time she touched them they felt like she was breaking them apart and putting them back together, and what did that feel like for her? 

It must be overwhelming, or she wouldn’t have flinched when they touched her hand yesterday. And it must be something she wanted, or she wouldn’t have kissed them like that. 

Myfanwy had been through so much. She had survived it because she was strong, in some ways the strongest person they knew. But in other ways all of it — Glengrove, her parents, Bristol, the fire — it had left her fragile. So fearful, so sensitive to anything that could disrupt her hardwon equilibrium. 

And now she was afraid that they would be one of those things, that was plain to see. 

They felt a curious tenderness in all four of their chests, just below their breastbones, at the thought. Couldn’t help smiling foolishly at her coat when they got home and hung it up, couldn’t help bringing each of their right hands up to touch it as they walked past. 

(Objectively speaking, it was an ugly coat. They were always trying to take Myfanwy shopping for a better one but she would never let them. Right now they loved it.) 

They would just have to show her that they didn’t want to disturb her careful life, that was all. That they would be gentle with her, that they were perfectly willing to go slow.

Slow would be good, in fact. The way she broke them apart, disrupted their compartmentalization, it was dangerous. They shouldn’t like it as much as they did. They had their career to think about. They would need to find some solutions, if they planned to keep kissing her. If she planned to keep kissing them.

So they would talk to her tomorrow, and they would make her understand that it would be better for both of them to keep whatever this was moving very, very slowly. And they should bring two bodies to that talk to make certain that she didn’t wreck their ability to function entirely.

(They should make Alex one of the bodies, probably, because that was the only one of their bodies she hadn’t kissed yet. They had never kissed anyone with all four of their bodies and they wanted to, with her.)

Really, they were on the same page. They wanted the same things. She’d see that tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea that Gestalt might especially want to kiss Myfanwy as Alex because that's the only body she hasn't kissed is borrowed from paradiamond's gorgeous fic Little Steps.


	5. Bad Habits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy does some research, and Gestalt falls back on bad habits.

The plan about showing her they would be gentle with her had only one flaw. They had failed to factor in the fact that they were completely fucking terrified of her. 

She wrong-footed them so easily. They felt themselves itching to change the balance of power, even after they’d decided to tilt matters in her favor. So even though they meant to send Eliza with Alex, to remind Myfanwy of that kiss and to keep at least one body around who was smaller than she was, at the last second they chickened out and sent Teddy instead. Went to meet her with all their defenses up. 

It shouldn’t matter who they sent, anyway, they told themselves, because Myfanwy had known them since well before the Chequy had decided that Eliza and Robert were for seductions and Alex and Teddy were for intimidations. She knew that whichever body was there it was all just them.

But they didn’t really have a good excuse for splitting themselves up and coming at her from two different directions, so that they were boxing her in without exits and she could only look at one of them at a time. An interrogation technique, a basic one. A move designed to intimidate.

They knew how it would feel for her. They had a woman’s body. They had a short woman’s body: Eliza was smaller even than Myfanwy; most people were taller than they were in that body. So they knew how it felt to have someone bigger than you were looming over you. They knew that the way they were pinning Myfanwy in was threatening.

Even though they wanted to make her feel safe. Well. They wanted to want to make her feel safe. 

They just also couldn’t help wanting to throw her a little. Leave her as off balance as she left them.

“What are you looking for?” they asked when they found her in the archives, and couldn’t help but feel pleased when she jumped.

They had planned this conversation with such good intentions but they kept falling back on bad habits. They fell apart around her so. 

The only thing was that she seemed to know it, how much she threw them. Once she’d seen both bodies they didn’t have much left to surprise her with, and after that she didn’t actually seem off balance at all. Kept laughing at them with her eyes. Threatened to kick them, made fun of them for coming to her with two bodies.

They shouldn’t have thought they could get away with intimidating her, even if she had been on edge around them ever since the Founder’s Feast. She was always like this, bright and mocking, had been since they were kids. She always knew that she was the one with the power around them, always knew she made them dizzy.

And it was so much better than her feeling threatened would have been. It was as though she hadn’t spent the past few days running away from them, as though no time at all had gone by since the coat room, as though it was the moment just before the coat room. Like all they were was two old friends flirting on the edge of something else, and nothing more complicated than that. Thrilling. 

When she knocked their hand away from their mouth they let themselves grab her by the wrist, haul her close. Took a second to be grateful she’d given them that opening with Teddy because they knew how to keep that face composed in a way that fit the game she was playing, and they could pour all their nerves and excitement into Alex behind her without her seeing. They’d known all along it was the right move to bring two bodies. 

But then they looked down with Alex’s eyes and saw Bristol’s name in her papers, and all their defenses came back up again. 

“We talked about this,” they said with all their voices. 

(The kind of error Glengrove had hated. A bunch of pawns walking past their office froze guiltily, as though they were the ones being reprimanded, and Eliza had to do their ice queen glare to get them moving again while Robert made their apologies to Grantchester for speaking out in the middle of a meeting.)

“Let it lie,” they said out of Teddy’s mouth, “and leave Andrew Bristol to his creepy fucking birds.” 

Myfanwy looked stunned, but they didn’t stick around to see if she had anything to say for herself. Stormed out of the archives and went to go see if there was anyone hanging around who Teddy could punch.

The thing about Andrew Bristol was, it had all absolutely been his fault. All of it, the fire, the people who had died, the way that afterwards Myfanwy had emptied herself out of anything that made her happy because she thought she deserved to be punished, that was all on Bristol. He’d been the adult, the doctor, preying on his teenage patient.

The other thing about Andrew Bristol was that Myfanwy had been in love with him, and they had always blamed her a little for that. 

Not fair on her. She hadn’t done anything wrong except trust someone who was supposed to take care of her. But they had been so angry at her when they found out about Bristol when it was still happening, before the fire, when she’d still been sleeping with him. They’d been just a kid themselves, and half mad with jealousy they couldn’t fully understand, and they’d thought they were so mature. It had taken them a long time for them to see how young they’d been then, how young she’d been. And by then the anger had sunk its teeth in them so deeply.

And now she was looking Bristol up again. Was maybe planning to see him. Which would be a violation of the agreement he signed with the Chequy after the fire. Not that that was their problem.

But just what the fuck did she think she was playing at? What was she doing, fucking them, kissing them, flirting with them, and then looking up Andrew fucking Bristol behind their backs? They couldn’t make any sense of it. 

Around noon Farrier pulled them aside for another one of her cozy little chats. Murmured that Myfanwy seemed to have gone missing again, and would they mind working out where she was? Just in case, they didn’t want any trouble again, not after what happened yesterday.

It didn’t take long. She wasn’t trying to hide at all. They didn’t even need to leave the office, just kept three of their bodies by the Box supervising Monica with her Russian prisoners and sent Alex into surveillance. Tracked her phone and then confirmed its GPS location on CCTV, and there it was: Myfanwy’s car, parked just outside that creepy fucking shop where Bristol sold those creepy fucking birds because he didn’t have live ones to torture anymore.

They took four deep and soothing breaths. Allowed themselves five seconds for a detailed fantasy of smashing each and every one of those birds Myfanwy kept in her apartment just to torture herself with. Then they told Farrier exactly where Myfanwy was, and that she didn’t appear to be in any present or physical danger. 

And after that, they told themselves sternly, there was no point in thinking about it anymore. No point whatsoever. They had their work to focus on, anyway.

They kept Alex in the surveillance room and decided the other three bodies might as well go out and catch this missing boy. Bring Monica along if she wanted to come so badly. The work would do them good. And they didn’t need to think about Myfanwy Thomas and what she might be doing with Andrew Bristol right at this very moment at all.

It was a shame about Monica. She was so hellbent on finding a way to prove that her dead boyfriend had somehow truly been on the side of right, when anyone who cared to look could see that the man had been a lying traitor who’d taken her for all he could and then scarpered off to the Lugate when he couldn’t get any more out of her. But she was too proud to admit it. 

Sad, really.

They would never let something like that happen to them.


	6. Failures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy is hiding something, and Gestalt does not care for failure.

They didn’t catch the boy. A failure. And Monica had found the lead that brought the boy to their attention in the first place, without any help whatsoever from them. Another failure. 

They had never cared for failure.

They had been so distracted with Myfanwy. Pointless, when after all she was busy with her secret burner phones and her secret meetings with Andrew Bristol. They had to take a step back, look at the bigger picture. They had their career to think about.

There had been something off with this case from the start. To begin with: Farrier telling them that Peter Van Syoc was the missing EVA target from the bridge. A clear lie. Extremophilia was a defensive ability, would never give Van Syoc anything like the power he’d need to kill eight people at a blow from a distance. So why had Farrier said he’d done it?

Secondly: there was the matter of the bridge, the one they kept carefully not looking at too closely. How much it reminded them of Glengrove. 

They hadn’t been close enough to the fire at Glengrove to see the flames, but there had been the smoke, thick and heavy and smothering over the whole campus. They got out with most of the rest of the students when the alarms started blaring. Only realized that Myfanwy wasn’t assembled up the drive with the rest of them after they were all already outside, and by then the fire fighters wouldn’t let them back in to look for her. 

The EMTs had wheeled her out later on a stretcher, unconscious, lungs raw from smoke inhalation, burns all over her rib cage. She still had the scars there. When she woke up she said she was never going to let anything like that happen again. 

But the bridge was something like that. 

What had she said that time she stopped by the bridge, to not see them? “The pavement’s turned to glass.” It had been like that at Glengrove, those spikes of fulgurite embedded in the ground. The way the air was hot and smelled of lightning. It had all been just the same.

It had bothered them from the beginning. But they had let it go the last time they had thought about it — something had come up — no, something had distracted them — 

She had distracted them. That was when she had kissed them. They had told her that they knew something was going on, and then she had kissed them. 

Had she … had she done it deliberately? To distract them? To throw them off the track?

No. She wouldn’t have done that. The Chequy wasn’t above having its agents seduce their way out of a jam, and neither were they, if it came to that, but it wasn’t Myfanwy’s style. 

Of course, neither was skiving off work to go to a cocktail bar or visit Andrew fucking Bristol. Neither was carrying a burner phone at the office and trying to cover it up with a bad joke that didn’t explain anything.

Still. She must have meant it when she kissed them in the infirmary, because that had been after they’d had sex at the Founder’s Feast. And there hadn’t been a reason for her to distract them from anything at the Founder’s Feast, because that was before the bridge.

Unless she knew the bridge was coming. Unless she was planning for it. She’d been scattered and distracted for weeks before …

They were being paranoid. They were spending too much time obsessing over whatever was going on with Myfanwy and it was driving them mad. Myfanwy was not trying to seduce them away from discovering that she had killed ten people with her EVA, because Myfanwy would never do something like that. Either of those somethings. She wouldn’t lead them on like that, and she wouldn’t use her power to hurt people. Even Lugate people. They knew her, and she just wouldn’t.

Monica had probably thought that, too, about her dead vulture boyfriend. Clearly still thought that. 

Well. They were nothing like Monica. Unlike her, they actually did know their — not girlfriend. Their friend. Whatever. Myfanwy. They knew her.

But they didn’t know why she’d gone fucking off to Bristol. Or what she’d done there, with him.

Or why vultures had attacked her the day before, or why both the bridge and the bank had smelled of her EVA.

Or why she’d been so hot and cold with them lately, why one minute she’d be smiling at them like they were the only person in the world she wanted to see and the next she couldn’t even bear to look at them. 

They still didn’t really know why she’d said, “It’s always been you, Gestalt,” at the Founder’s Feast and then put her hands in all of them. Not like she hadn’t known how they felt about her for the past fifteen years before that. Not like there was any particular reason for things to change, for her to finally come to them, on that night of all nights. 

They didn’t enjoy not knowing information. They were in the business of finding out information other people were trying to keep from them. They were good at it.

But they were also Myfanwy’s friend. They had never tried to find out anything like that from her before. They had never needed to.

They would just ask her, they decided. She was their friend, and even with everything else, they should still be able to talk to her. They would get her alone, and they would push away all the other things that had been so distracting lately, all the kissing and the worrying about vetting officers and the weird confusing jealousy, and remind her that after all, they had been friends for half their lives. And then they would ask her, as her best and oldest friend, to tell them the truth about what was really going on.

And probably she would. Probably she would explain everything, and there would be some simple and stupid reason for all of this, and she’d make fun of them for thinking it was anything else, and then they could just leave it lie and focus on finding the actual EVA target.

But just in case, they’d take Teddy for their talk. Just in case. 

\--

The talk didn’t go as planned.

To begin with, she wouldn’t let them come up to her flat. Was obviously hiding something up there, and not well. 

Then they tried to pull out some of the old Glengrove stories, just to remind her of how long they’d known each other, and her face was completely blank. No recognition whatsoever. Like they were strangers.

They started to wish they hadn’t brought Teddy. It wasn’t as though their bodies really had separate personalities, that was all for show, but when they were anxious they tended to operate on instinct. Revert to what was familiar. And the neural pathways that were carved the deepest into Teddy’s gray matter were all to do with interrogation and intimidation. It was what they had trained that body for. They were about to escalate this conversation without even really wanting to.

Except this must have been what they wanted, because otherwise why else had they come to her as Teddy? The idea had been lurking in the back of their mind the whole time, that they would have to press matters. And now they pressed.

“Peter Van Syoc didn’t kill those people,” they told her. Watched her face, and there it was: she knew. She knew something. She knew something about the bridge and she wasn’t telling them. It was so clear now that they were looking for it. 

They started to walk her through it, all of the evidence that was piling up, unignorable and unexplainable, that kept pointing them towards her whether they liked it or not. Heard their voice go knife sharp on Bristol’s name, and of course she was on that weakness immediately, asking them how long they’d been following her. As though she were the one who got to be indignant here. As though they were the ones betraying her trust. 

They moved in close, showing Teddy’s paces a little, interrogation 101, and watched her go still and watchful and afraid. She hadn’t been afraid of them last time they’d pulled this move on her, in the archives, but she was now, and she looked very small. The thought _like a bird in a cage_ went through their mind, presenting them with an image of one of Bristol’s glass birds, and they batted it away. 

They were playing fair. They were asking her straight out what she was doing, what kind of mess she’d gotten herself into. And if she told them, if she told them now, they could help her. It didn’t matter what it was, if she needed them to keep the secret from the Chequy, if she needed to leave town, if she needed to run away, they could help her. 

But she didn’t say anything. Didn’t even try to tell them that she’d fucked them for any reason other than trying to put them off her track. 

So those were the answers they were looking for, then.

\--

The thing was, even with everything else, they still knew Myfanwy. And if she was doing all this, if she’d gotten messed up with the Lugate, there was probably a reason. 

Like the Lugate was blackmailing her, maybe. Threatening someone she cared about? She did still have a sister out there somewhere. 

Or maybe the reason wasn’t something concrete and easy to talk through. Maybe the reason was that she had just snapped. Maybe everything the Chequy had done to her had been too much. 

She was fragile. They knew that. That was why she lived her life so carefully, why she never went anywhere but her flat and the office and sometimes their flat, why she wore those ugly gray suits like they were armor: she was protecting herself, because she knew how easily she could break. 

And maybe it had finally happened when they weren’t looking. Maybe her protections had finally failed and she had broken. 

Or maybe they had never actually known her at all. Maybe they were like poor sad Monica, rhapsodizing over someone who had never existed.

If that was the case, if she’d been tricking them all along, they had to bring her in to the Chequy. It was their duty.

And if the Lugate was threatening someone she cared about, they had to bring her in to the Chequy, because they’d need the Chequy’s resources to protect her and whoever else it was.

And if she really and truly had snapped, they had to bring her into the Chequy, because no one else would be equipped to help her.

So. They brought her in.


	7. Wiped Clean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy comes clean, and Gestalt is an idiot.

They had certain expectations about what Myfanwy would be like in interrogation.

Probably she would be afraid. She was anxious at the best of times, and she knew better than most people exactly how punitive the Chequy could be to those who betrayed it. And maybe she hadn’t ever exactly been best mates with Grantchester — it had always been clear that she was a Farrier project — but there was a certain amount of trust and camaraderie between all the members of the Court. It wasn’t as though they had families or friends outside each other. Naturally it would hurt Myfanwy to see Grantchester treating her as an enemy, as a problem to be solved. Probably she would cry. 

And it was a shame, but it had to be done, because in the long run this was the only way they could see to help her. Assuming she was still in a position from which she could be helped. 

But once Grantchester was in the room with her, she didn’t seem particularly afraid or sad. Mostly, from where they were sitting in the surveillance booth, without a clear view of her face, she sounded annoyed. 

Curious. Did she not understand exactly what her situation was, how dangerous it could be for her? They would protect her, of course they would, but they couldn’t shield her from everything. She shouldn’t be counting on that. 

Although it didn’t sound as though she were counting on anything from them, given how angry she sounded when she talked about them interrupting her meeting. As though they had wrecked some carefully laid plans of hers. Instead of stepping in when someone clearly had to step in and save her. 

And then she said: “I am more than happy to tell you everything I know, but I’m afraid the story doesn’t go back very far. The night of the bridge incident, my memory was wiped clean.”

And then they stopped being able to hear what she was saying for a little while. 

Eliza kept the car moving, hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and Alex stared blindly at the tracker that was leading them to Monica’s phone. In the surveillance booth, Teddy and Robert sat perfectly still. 

They were afraid to move. Afraid to do anything that might make a noise and prompt someone to turn around and see them, notice them, notice exactly how deeply they’d failed to protect her.

Wiped clean. Her memory was wiped clean. 

Grantchester administered truth serum, a little more nicely than he’d have done it if Myfanwy hadn’t been a court member, and they sat and listened while Myfanwy’s voice carried evenly over the speakers into the booth, as though what she was saying wasn’t completely and absolutely shattering.

She had no memory at all of anything that had come before the bridge. Before five days ago. 

All that time they’d spent obsessing over her and they’d failed to notice the blindingly obvious: the strange way she was acting with them, the way she kept running hot and cold and not reacting to old memories and looking at them as though she barely knew them, it was because _she didn’t know them_. Because she didn’t remember any of it. Glengrove, their training, their first few years working out what it meant to be real agents together, getting promoted and celebrating together, none of that was real for her. She didn’t even remember the Founder’s Feast. 

Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. That meant that the way she found out they had sex must have been Monday at work, when she’d told them that stupid, obvious lie about getting stung by a bee and they’d said — what had they said? “My coat still smells of rose oil.” Jesus Christ. No wonder she’d flinched when they touched her.

She should have told them. She should have. They hadn’t been totally blind, they had seen that something was different with her, something was wrong, and they had asked her about it again and again, and she should have told them.

Not that she had any reason to tell them in particular. She hadn’t told anyone else either, except apparently Farrier had shown up at her flat already knowing. 

But still. She could have told them, and she didn’t. She should have known she could tell them. They would have helped her. They would have fixed everything.

Grantchester had them turn on the cameras so he could use this whole mess to take down Farrier, because apparently the silver lining here was that the erasure of Myfanwy’s memory was going to be a fantastic thing for Grantchester’s career, and they watched through the video feed as she walked him through everything she could remember. Her voice was hazy with the effects of truth serum, but she kept the timeline coherent enough: she’d woken up on the bridge, surrounded by bodies, with no memory of anything else. Anyone else. 

She’d left herself letters, apparently. Detailed instructions. Like that video of her Grantchester had played on the tablet, where she looked so afraid but was making herself stare what was coming right in the face, the way she always did, because she never hid herself from ideas she didn’t like. 

They thought of her as fragile but she could be so brave. Braver than they were, probably. They would have compartmentalized as much as they could in her situation, keep the truth of what they were facing as far away from themselves as possible. 

She’d known all along it was coming. She’d done so much work to prepare for this. Why hadn’t she told them?

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She had. The psychic, that must have been how she’d known, the psychic she’d brought in who was an obvious fake except apparently she wasn’t. The psychic must have warned her about her memories, and then she’d tried to tell them and they’d brushed it off, because Farrier had told them not to indulge her about it. 

Farrier. Myfanwy was sure Farrier had been the one who did it, who erased her memories. It felt impossible. Farrier was a bitch and she played favorites and they knew very well they had never been a favorite of hers, but Myfanwy had been. And anyway, she protected her assets. She protected the agency. 

But then on the other hand they had just seen Farrier go plowing through the park, mowing down civilians and her own operatives to get to the boy, with a power that they’d mostly considered a legend until today because they had never actually seen it in action before. Farrier had secrets too. 

Farrier and Myfanwy between the two of them had kept this secret from everyone, from Grantchester and from them and from everyone, and they didn’t really expect more from Farrier but Myfanwy should have told them. She should have.

They told her so after Grantchester was finished with her, while they were returning her effects to her. Told her that she should have known she could trust them.

And she looked at them a little apologetically but not at all regretfully. Told them that she had wanted to tell them, but that she hadn’t because she hadn’t trusted them, because she just met them five days ago. 

“I don’t know you at all,” she said. Looked them right in Robert’s face when she said it.

Funny. They hadn’t expected it to hurt that much until she said it out loud, and then it hurt worse than anything else they could think of. 

They gave her all her things back and walked away.

It was just, they supposed, that most people didn’t know them. Most people they dealt with on a day to day basis knew what they were, but they didn’t really understand about them, about how they could be four and one at once. Treated them like they were all co-workers or siblings or loose acquaintances instead of the same person. Played favorites with the bodies, even unconsciously, would condescend to Eliza and defer to Robert; pal around with Alex and be a little afraid of Teddy. 

And usually Gestalt encouraged all that. Because when people did understand most often they were disgusted. Or fascinated in a way that made Gestalt feel like a lab experiment.

And mostly that was fine because there was a person out there who did understand and never made them feel like a science project and who just wanted to hang out with whichever bodies were free and bitch about paperwork and eat bad Chinese takeout and that was Myfanwy. They had her, and as long as they had her it was all okay. And now they didn’t have her anymore, and that was —

It just hurt more than they thought it would. That was all.

“I do feel something for you,” she’d said. Like it was supposed to be some sort of consolation. What did that even mean? 

And did she feel somethings for other people too? Was there for instance someone at the office who she had trusted more than them, someone she had told about her memories when she hadn’t told them? Not Grantchester, obviously, but someone else. Ingrid, maybe?

They had to talk to Ingrid anyway to track down Monica, because obviously what they wanted to do with their day today was chase after loud angry Americans, so they thought they might as well kill two birds while they were at it. (Birds again. Fucking Bristol. Not that he had anything in particular to do with this as far as they could tell but fuck him just on principle.) 

But Ingrid said that Myfanwy didn’t tell her about the memory wipe. She didn’t _have to_, apparently, because Ingrid just _knew_, because that was what it was like when you _really, really knew someone_. Jesus Christ. 

The thing was, they always sort of thought they did know Myfanwy. They had always sort of thought that they knew her better than anyone and that she knew them, she really knew them, in a way that went deeper than just shared history. Like — and this was so stupid of them, such a starry-eyed teenage thing to think, they hadn’t even really been aware that it was something they thought but apparently they always had — like they saw each other’s souls. And that was why it felt the way it did when she touched them. 

They were such an idiot. Such a stupid fucking moron. 

How did they not see it? How had they not known?

\--

The thing with Monica. It was a bad idea, an objectively stupid idea. But they felt like doing something objectively stupid.

And when they looked at Monica, they could see the same thing that they saw when they looked at their own faces. She felt tricked, betrayed, like she’d made an idiot of herself by loving someone and now she’d lost even her old idea of that person, and her old idea of herself with it. 

They’d spent the whole week feeling superior to her for holding on to the dream of dead heroic Marcus but they were just the same as she was, really. And it felt — not good, exactly, but consoling — to be with someone who felt just as sad and stupid as they did, having sad and stupid sex.

Only then Myfanwy came marching into the office where they’d left their other three bodies carefully doing nothing in particular, and her face was burning bright and fierce, in a way they hadn’t seen since before the fire. 

They told her they couldn’t talk right now but she took no notice. Took Eliza by the hand and they could feel her touch going through all of them, right away, the quick electric force of it. And so what were they meant to do now? With Myfanwy’s hands in all of them while they were literally inside someone else?

They scrambled off Monica’s hotel bed in a panic, saying, “Shit shit shit, sorry, shit,” knocking Alex’s shin against the bedpost hard enough to bruise. 

“Yeah, okay, this really isn’t working for me either,” said Monica, and got up to take a shower. 

Myfanwy was talking fast and excited, exhilarated over something they couldn’t quite follow, but then she was telling them that — that being around them was emotionally intense for her? That she wanted them to take her somewhere they used to go? That she wanted to go to their flat?

“I want to remember what we had,” she said, and her eyes were wide and earnest.

“What the fuck,” they said with Alex’s mouth. Monica couldn’t hear them over the shower, probably. “Just. What the fuck.” 

And then before they could say anything to Myfanwy Ingrid came wheeling on into the conference room where they were sitting, because she was just determined to ruin their life today, and sent Myfanwy running off to Farrier’s cell. Or maybe Ingrid was saving them, actually, because they weren’t really sure what they were about to say. 

“Begone, demon temptress, I will think of you no more?” “Yes, thank you, I would love to distill fifteen years of friendship into a quick coffee shop tour, but only the coffee shops within a five-block radius of the office and your flat because until five days ago you were borderline agoraphobic, and also certainly, let’s throw in my flat that in all honesty does not have enough chairs for both me and you to sit in should you decide to come visit?” “Please explain in detail what exactly you mean by ‘emotionally intense’ and also do you think we should get married?”

Honestly, a tossup. 

They took themselves to the surveillance room, because sometimes they were sad and desperate and needed to get information whatever way they could find it, and sat down to watch whatever it was that Farrier had to say to Myfanwy in her cell.


	8. Soon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myfanwy did it to herself, and Gestalt didn't see it.

After Farrier finished her story, Myfanwy was still and silent for a long, long moment. She had her back to the camera and they couldn’t see her face, but her spine seemed unnaturally straight.

“Thank you for telling me that,” she said at last.

“Myfanwy —” Farrier started, but Myfanwy cut her off.

“I don’t think I’d like to hear from you again any time soon,” she said. “Perhaps ever.”

She walked out of the Box.

From the surveillance room they could follow her path: down the hall, up the stairs, through the security doors and into the car park. Could have followed her all the way home if they switched to CCTV, probably, but that would have been even more creepy than they were already being and they had to draw the line somewhere.

She didn’t look for them once on the way out the building, never even turned her head. Not that they had expected her to.

They felt curiously drained when they got three of their bodies back to their flat. Felt they had to leave Alex in Monica’s hotel room because as bad as staying was at this point, leaving would probably be worse. (Monica had looked them up and down once after she got out of the shower and said, “Don’t even tell me, okay? I can’t work up the energy to care.” This was why they shouldn’t have broken their “only sleep with strangers or marks or Myfanwy” rule.)

It seemed as though it would have been romantic, in a depressing sort of way, to stay awake all night and fret over everything that had happened, but instead they went straight to bed and fell asleep as soon as they could, three of their bodies curled up around the space where Alex’s should be, and the fourth lying rigid as a board on the farthest edge of the hotel bed so as not to disturb Monica. They’d spent all of their energy in that frantic moment Myfanwy came running into the conference room, and now none of it was left, and they could just sleep and not think about it, not think about anything at all.

\--

_She did it to herself_, was the first thing they thought when they woke up in the morning. It was as though the thought had been waiting for them, forming as they slept and then patiently biding its time for them to come to consciousness so that it could present itself fully formed in their heads as soon as they were awake: Myfanwy wiped her memory away herself.

They had always known that she didn’t particularly like herself, but then who did like themselves?

But to willingly wipe herself away like that, erase everything. Like the cutting only worse.

“I thought it might be the best thing for you,” Farrier had said last night. “Everything that you’d gone through, Bristol and all of it, I’d always wished there was a way to take it away, so that it had never happened. Nazim seemed like the closest thing we were going to get to that, like a best-case scenario. And you agreed, in the end.”

She had agreed. She’d been scared, she’d been confused, she’d had maybe an hour at most to decide, but she’d agreed to it.

She’d erased them along with everything else, too, and that hurt. But not as much as realizing that she’d willfully gone and tried to undo everything that had happened to her, everything she had ever done, since she was sixteen years old.

They hadn’t known she hated herself that much. They should have known. They should have seen it. How had they not seen it? They had always thought they knew her so well. And the whole time she’d been ready to do a thing like that to herself.

But the only thing was. Erasing the memories. It hadn’t really erased her.

She was still there. Myfanwy. Still recognizably herself, even, just — moreso. More like she had been when she first got to Glengrove, all nerve and curiosity. The way she’d brazened her way through all those meetings, walked into all those rooms where she had no business being, just so she could find some answers.

She didn’t hide herself away so much now. Didn’t seem terrified of the world.

Didn’t seem as though she hated herself. At least not enough to wipe herself away. At least not as far as they could tell. And that was a good thing. Was what they wanted for her.

But so then was it worth it? Wiping away everything that came before?

She wasn’t dead. They had to keep remembering that. It wasn’t literally like she’d killed herself.

And she really could have died. The Lugate going after her all those times, her power an unknown quantity. She could have died, and she hadn’t.

Or she could have left. Could have taken Box Two and vanished without a trace, left them never knowing anything that had happened, left them with that night in the coat room their last chance of any memory of her.

Fuck. What she’d said. “Whatever happens next, I want you to know that I don’t regret this. I don’t regret _you_ Gestalt.” She’d said it because she’d known her month was nearly up. She’d known it was her last night remembering everything. And she’d chosen to spend it with them.

They should be so grateful that she had. That she hadn’t left. That she wasn’t really dead, that she hadn’t run away. That they still had her in their life. Even new. Even different.

Especially new and different?

They just couldn’t stop it from playing through all their heads in a loop, that terrible thought: _She did it to herself_.

Also. It was selfish to think like this, after everything. But. What was going on with them?

She had no idea who they were. She had only met them five days ago. Six days now. And they had been so confused, they must have made a terrible first impression, standing too close and nattering on at her about rose oil one minute and then accusing her of treason the next.

(They had thought that Myfanwy Thomas committing treason was more plausible than her getting her memory erased. Even after they knew there was an EVA who could erase memories running about town. Where had their mind been? With her, with her, with her.)

But she’d kissed them that time. And she’d said she wanted to remember what they had.

Did she still? Even after hearing all of Farrier’s story? After learning that whatever it was that they might have had, it wasn’t anywhere near enough to outweigh all the rest of it, everything else she’d gone through?

They didn’t know. They couldn’t tell. They used to be able to read her so well, predict her so easily, and that was all gone now. Wiped away along with everything else.

Maybe they’d know if they saw her. If they talked to her.

They should get up. Stop staring at the ceiling and wallowing in self pity. Not apologize to Monica, because they never apologized to anyone if they could help it, and also probably she would hit them if they tried and she had super strength. Maybe order her breakfast?

They were so much luckier than Monica was. Marcus was dead, and Monica was never going to get to confront him, would never be able to integrate what she’d learned about him from Bronwyn with all her old memories of him. Would always be wondering what was real and what was a lie.

Myfanwy was alive. She wasn’t dead. They had to remember that. And they would see her soon, as soon as they were back in the office.

Everything would work out fine in the end, because they would see her soon.


	9. Lightning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No regrets.

Myfanwy was not at the office. 

What was there instead was a letter. A horrifying fucking letter.

What were they meant to do with that? With “I secretly wanted to touch your hair when we were at school together and never mentioned it for fifteen years but now I remember it even though my memory’s been ransacked so just thought I’d share” and “the spark I feel for you is real” (_what_?) and “I’ll sign this letter ‘with love’ just to torment you” and “oh by the way, I’m running away and will probably have been kidnapped and/or killed by vultures/rogue Lugate operatives/et cetera by the time you read this”? Just what the fuck were they supposed to do?

They had Ingrid put drawbridge protocol into place. Let the planes sit on the bloody tarmac if they had to. 

She was still alive. She was. She had to be. She was still alive and she couldn’t possibly have gone further than the continent, so she was close, more or less. They just had to find her.

But looking for one girl with intermittent transdermal neurotransmission in the entire continent of Europe was like looking for a microscopic needle in an ocean of hay. They were poring through incident reports with all four sets of eyes, dropping all their other work, looking for anything, but none of it was right. A death in France: mugging gone wrong, not her. A fire in Greece: gasoline-fueled, not her. Problems with the power grid in Spain: one of the power lines got tangled up in a fallen tree, not her, not her, not her.

What if this was the thing, finally, that took her away from them? After they failed to protect her from Bristol and they failed to protect her from Farrier and they failed to protect her from her sister’s plans and they failed to protect her from the Lugate on the bridge, and after all that she was still there next to them, what if this was the thing that made her leave? 

What if she left them alone in the Chequy with nothing but their own four bodies for company?

They couldn’t let that happen. Would bar the doors against her going themselves if they had to. 

Train collision in Germany. Not her. 

\--

In the end they didn’t find her. Instead she called them, breathless, walking fast, they could hear her shoes clomping on the other end of the line. No fear at all in her voice. Said there was an auction at Viktor Danilov’s house. Wanted them to go save Farrier. They told her to run and she wouldn’t. 

(She would have before, probably. If she still had her memories, she would have run. Was this better? Was this who she was supposed to be, someone foolhardy and brave? Was it wrong that they had loved her when she was easier to protect?)

Everyone who worked for the Chequy had mixed feelings about it, even them, but they couldn’t deny that it knew how to manage an emergency. Even Grantchester. He made a fuss about wanting to follow protocol, needing authorization to go after Danilov, but when he couldn’t get it he didn’t try to stop them from heading out. He understood what needed to be done. 

It was a relief in a way, infiltrating Danilov’s ostentatious compound. The kind of thing they were good at, the kind of thing they didn’t have to keep worrying obsessively over in their mind. Something concrete to punch, to shoot at. Also Danilov’s taste in decor was vulgar and it was nice to wreck it a little. 

Inside they found her easily enough, but she still wouldn’t go with them. Wanted to go after Lorik, had a plan to stop the whole auction from happening, to rescue all the other EVAs, when they couldn’t hope for more than getting her out with Farrier. They only wanted to save the people they cared about, but she wanted to be a hero and save everyone. 

They told her to stop, to leave it to them, but she still wouldn’t come with them. Said she’d slow them down, that they should just go find Farrier.

“Come back for me,” she said. Voice steady. Like she’d be there when they got back. Like that had ever worked out for them before. 

“Lock the fucking door,” they said. Then they did as she said, like they always did. 

Found Farrier, helped her limp out of the building. (She could barely move, they must have drugged her, had Myfanwy been in that state too?) It was all working just as they had planned it except for Myfanwy refusing to go with them, click-click-click, every shot landing and every one of Danilov’s men going down nice and easy, and they were beginning to think they could get everyone out without any problems at all, but when they got back to the powder room where they’d found Myfanwy before she was gone. Of course. 

They kept rolling through the house, dropping tear gas, scaring the maids, and there weren’t that many targets left for them to take out here but they could tell that every move they made they were getting closer to Lorik. Where Myfanwy had wanted to go.

Outside the police were starting to roll in, and the ambulances. Shit, they’d have to divert a body or two to dealing with them if they wanted to keep the police away from Myfanwy. But she was still here somewhere, they were sure of it, she was still here —

And then the lights started to flicker and they smelled lightning and they knew for sure.

It was different to how it usually was with her. Every time they’d seen her use her EVA before, properly using it and not just letting bits of static shock dribble out of her fingers so she could de-lint her sweaters more efficiently, it had come pouring uncontrollably out of her body, a whole storm of power moving wherever it wanted to go. 

This was deliberate. A wave of power moving through the air with intention, aiming at a target. 

Myfanwy was taking out Lorik. And she was using her EVA to do it, because she knew how to control it now. Wasn’t blocked by trauma or guilt or sadness or anything.

This was the person Myfanwy had always been meant to be, before Glengrove, before Bristol, before the fire. This was who she could be now. A hero. 

Was it wrong that they loved her now, when she didn’t need them to protect her at all?

They cleared out the house. Headed out to talk to the emergency response. Got the EMTs taking care of Linda, waved some badges at the police, gave them the Robert treatment, sharp nods and authoritative voice, keeping them off Myfanwy’s back. One thing they could do for her, anyway.

When she walked out of the house with the rest of the EVAs from the auction there was smoke from the tear bombs billowing around her and she was wearing black leather like it was armor and her hair was curling around her face and they couldn’t help it. They hugged her tight, and she hugged them back, the lightning smell of her all around them as she burned away everything else in their arms. 

They pulled back, let her do her thing, told her Linda wanted to talk to her. But when she walked past them they knew suddenly, deep in their guts, that this could be the last time they’d ever see her. 

She wanted to leave. She didn’t need them or the Chequy for anything, not now that she could protect herself. And there wasn’t any other reason for them to try to keep her there with them. Only them, and their foolish hearts, and that wasn’t enough. 

So they took down all their defenses and went to her as Alex, and let their face say whatever it was going to say. Something pathetic, probably. But it might be the last time. 

“I know you wanted to leave,” they said, “and if you still do, I won’t be angry. But I’ll miss you.” 

She looked them in the eye at that, and for just a second, it was exactly the same as it had been outside the coat room that first night, that last night, when she had looked at them just like that and put her hand on their face and said, “Whatever happens next, I want you to know that I don’t regret this.” 

At the time they had thought she’d meant that she wanted to start something new, that she meant that she didn’t regret beginning a new chapter together with them. But that hadn’t been it at all: she’d been ending a chapter that night, finishing up the part of her life that she would remember as that version of herself, and she had chosen to end it with them and she hadn’t regretted it. 

And they knew how she felt now because they couldn’t regret it either. None of it, not that night and not any of the nights before and not any of them after. They might never see Myfanwy again after this and they couldn’t regret any of it, because it had left her here, striding out of the smoke like a fucking knight in black armor from a fairy story who’s just vanquished the monster, all the self-hatred and the doubt and the fear from before gone, burned out of her eyes from the sheer force of her. 

She blinked one time, as though maybe she was going to think about crying, and then she organized her face into something approximating a smile instead. “Thank you,” she said. 

Then she walked away from them, and they watched her go.

They had told her how they felt about her, told her without any cover or defenses, no denials or secrets left. They had told her they wouldn’t try to stop her from going. 

She could be happy now. She could really be happy. 

No, they weren’t going to regret any of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap, everyone! This is honestly the first time I've written fic in something like ten years, so thanks so much for coming along on this ride with me.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is complete and will be updated once a day.


End file.
